Chris Selley: City has spoken, and it is angry

One can only imagine the horror in certain quarters. Uncouth, uncultured, suburban, journalist-chasing, drunk driving, marijuana-possessing Air Canada Centre ejectee and lone wolf former city councillor Rob Ford is mayor-elect of Toronto — and not just by a little. Mayor David Miller congratulated him last night and so should everyone else. It sure won’t help not to.

Whatever happens over the next four years, this election sent a hugely important message to Canadian politicians: Ignore voter anger at your peril. If you think voters shouldn’t be angry, make your case early and sincerely. Don’t just blame a senior level of government for your problems.

There is, of course, the matter of the next four years to consider. Mr. Ford says his first order of business today will be to call every single councillor and set up a meeting, and that could hardly be more important. He’s got a city to run, and some good ideas. And the fact he just successfully completed an incredibly even-tempered campaign suggests he may in fact be perfectly capable of building bridges, staffing committees with an eye toward progress and driving through some facsimile of his incredibly ambitious fiscal agenda — all the things we were haughtily assured he couldn’t.

The fact remains: City Hall needs change in a bad way.

The “everything’s OK” brigade was out in force in the final week of the campaign. “The city’s finances are in good order,” veteran NDP strategist Brian Topp declared in The Globe and Mail. In the Toronto Star, economist Hugh MacKenzie cracked wise about the balance book: “The city’s finances are in such poor shape that the 2011 fiscal plan of every one of the candidates for mayor starts with a description of what they’d do with the surplus expected at the end of 2010.”

Right. They’d all put the projected surplus against the $503-million budget shortfall facing the city in 2011 (more than that, once you add the cost of their campaign promises). That’s the same kind of shortfall we face every year — the sort that rapidly precipitates TTC fare increases, property tax hikes, the introduction of car registration and land transfer taxes, chintzy across-the-board budget cuts and other frantic manoeuvres. To some extent that’s inevitable in a jurisdiction that can’t legally run a deficit, but it’s impossible to convince people things are under control in such a panic-based environment.

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Anyway, the anger was more fundamental, and more thoughtful, than that. To tell people the budget is balanced, or that property taxes in Toronto are the lowest in the GTA, ignores the opportunity costs of wasteful spending. There’s no denying that the TTC — to pick the example most discussed during this campaign — is a dusty, hollow shell of what it could have been had more money been invested intelligently in public transit in recent years. Mr. Ford clearly doesn’t understand transit, and it fills me with dread. But he says he can cut nearly $2-billion in the next four years through attrition and efficiencies alone, without impacting services. That’s our money to use! Who in his right mind would object to him trying?

Mr. Ford should take solace — and anti-Ford Torontonians and their councillors should take notice — that the Mayor-elect has a tremendous mandate for change. Mr. Smitherman did not run a fiscally moderate platform, by Toronto standards. He promised big cuts of his own. And together, they won 83% of the vote. A subtle hint, it wasn’t.

Councillors have their own mandates, of course, and no one should expect them to change their stripes completely. The mixed bag of results at the ward level don’t suggest the great gravy train robbery trickled systematically down. (Though it’s certainly tempting to see Sandra Bussin’s ouster as a statement that certain behaviour just isn’t acceptable anymore). But nobody wants gridlock, and there are plenty of objectives on Mr. Ford’s to-do list — notably open government initiatives — that could prove effective bridge-builders.

Opening up garbage collection to competitive bidding will be another interesting debate. This is not an “anti-union” measure. The replacement workers — if they were indeed replacements; CUPE could easily win the contract — would themselves almost certainly be unionized. But it would be a quick declaration that things are not as they were, that we’ve simply passed the point in history where something like trash pickup needs to be the exclusive domain of the public employee.

That will be an important test for the new council. If it freaks out, we’ll know we’re in trouble. But if it passes, it would be a hugely important psychological step even if it didn’t save a single dollar in 2011. I, for one, am optimistic.